Recap for Polkadot’s FIRST Metaverse Meetup — a Bitter Sweet Experience

14 min readDec 7, 2021

As you know, last Saturday (December 4th) at 8pm, we hosted “Polkadot’s First Metaverse Meetup” with our partner MetaGamiMall.

The event was held in Decentraland (DCL for short). To put it simply, DCL is a virtual 3D world based on the blockchain, where you can participate in activities, watch exhibitions, dance, buy NFT lands to build houses, develop games, and so on.

What a wonderful thing it should be, if we can have a Polkadot gathering-up in this magical metaverse and people can dress up for this party.

Even before the event started, we saw people flooding into the venue. Soon, the meetup venue was crowded!

We were so excited! Think about that, this was the first time that the Polkadot ecosystem had an event in the metaverse. Unexpectedly, it had attracted so many people!

According to background statistics, there are up to 1,300 people online at the same time during the event! We prepared 1000 PolkaWorld POAPs (the event participation badge NFT in the DCL), which were claimed in an hour, and some people with slower internet speeds (such as me) could not get one at all.

But soon after the starting time, something embarrassing happened… Because there were too many people participating in our activities, I believe it’s a bit unbearable for Decentraland’s server, so…it’s like…crashed…for a little while.

So some people who rushed to participate in the event realized that they could not log in DCL at all…

When they finally made it to log in, they found that the original gorgeous buildings were gone, and it became a vast expanse of blue…

After a few minutes, the buildings and event venues were finally loaded. But many participants found that they were unable to hear any talks from ecosystem projects as expected. What happened?

What even worse is that some other people seemed to enjoy the talks. How?Were they in a different world with mine?

Well, the answer might be “yes”. Because the sudden influx, DCL can only divert different batches of people to different servers, with a maximum of 100 people on each server.

Here comes the problem. People on different servers can only hear the voices of people who are on the same server. That is to say, only for those 100 people who came early enough to be assigned to the same server with the guests, they can hear the talks as expected. The rest of the participants can only wander around by themselves in various “parallel universes”.

In the end… I’m sorry to say it, but in order to allow most people to hear the talks normally, we finally bowed our heads to the centralized service and turn to the old Tencent Conference. So all of a sudden, the world became smooth. Now everything looked good, except that it doesn’t look so “metaverse”.

Anyway, seeing so many people coming to our events, checking in and listening to our talks, and refreshing the page in the face of extreme lag, we are very touched.

Especially when we saw some people who had never played DCL before, and specially downloaded MetaMask this time just to check in on our activities.

There was also a young lady who wore a nice Polkadot dress for the event.

And an artistic fan @Live247stream drew our event into a picture.

Someone also found the Easter Eggs — Photos of Dr. Gavin Wood hid on the roof.

Here I want to say “thank you” to everyone who participated in the event, you made that extraordinary. And I also want to say “sorry”, I know it was a not very good experience for most of you due to some technical reasons.

For those who have participated in the “take a pic and tweet it” ruffles, we will announce the winning list on PolkaWorld’s Twitter account @polkaworld_org in the next few days. You can pay close attention to it.

The theme of this event is “Polkadot Parachain Slot”. Many people at the event missed the talks, though. So we summarized it here for everyone to review. They are mainly about the updates around parachains, such as the Crowdloan plans and the plans after winning a slot.

The following is the summary of sharing sessions.

Event Introduction

Event Name: The First Polkadot Metaverse Meetup

Theme: Polkadot/Kusama Parachain Slot Auctions

Time: 12PM-1:30 PM, December 4th, 2021

Adress：Meta GamiMall in DCL https://play.decentraland.org/?island=I91y4&position=107%2C23&realm=dg

Guest Speakers

Acala Community Contributor — LYZ

Astar Core Team Member — Mingshi

Bifrost Technical Committee Member — Lurpis

Litentry Director of Business Operation — Mel Zhou

Parallel Chinese Market Lead — Jennifer

Zenlink Community Ambassador — Toga

Zeitgeist Chinese Ecosystem Lead — Whisker

Keynote-speech Recap

Acala Network

This is Yuzhu from Acala Network. My current work focuses on the Chinese Community and marketing for Acala. And then, I will introduce Acala briefly.

Acala is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform optimized for DeFi and scaling DApps to Polkadot. The blockchain has built-in DeFi protocols for application developers to leverage, including a decentralized stablecoin (Acala Dollar — aUSD), a trustless staking derivative (liquid DOT — LDOT), and a decentralized exchange. For Polkadot Parachain auction, the release liquidity for Crowdloan DOT, name lcDOT also be added Acala’s suite of derivative products to enable new DeFi use cases within Acala’s DeFi Economy.

We already won the first slot on Polkadot on November 18th! And we will connect to Polkadot with other 4 parachains like Moonbeam and Astar around December 17th. Then we will start the launch rollout plan, and the transfer is expected to start in January。

As all know, Karura also won the first slot auction in Kusama.

Karura is the all-in-one DeFi hub of Kusama. Founded by the Acala Foundation, Karura also is a scalable, EVM-compatible network optimized for DeFi. The platform offers a suite of financial applications including a trustless staking derivative (liquid KSM), a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets (kUSD), and an AMM DEX — all protocols with micro gas fees that can be paid in any token. Karura is a blockchain platform custom-built for DeFi and powered by KAR, which enables settlement for transactions and smart contract execution, incentivizes node operators, and empowers its holders to participate in governance.

Acala was founded in Oct 2019, has received several Web3 Foundation grants, has backing from Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Arrington XRP Capital, and other top firms, and we have a distributed team in New Zealand, China, Europe, South America, and the United States.

Bifrost

Hello everyone, I am Lurpis, a member of the Bifrost Technical Committee. Bifrost was established in July 2019. It is the first batch of projects to obtain a Web3 foundation grant.

Bifrost is positioned as a bridge and asset agreement in the Polkadot ecosystem, aiming to connect the Polkadot parachain-parachain and parachain-heterogeneous chain through providing derivatives for staking. Bifrost has successfully obtained the first batch of parachains in Kusama, and launched three derivatives such as vsDOT, vsKSM, vETH, and established an AMM liquidity pool together with Zenlink, with the total liquidity scale exceeding $10 million, and the total TVL exceeding 170 million U.S. dollars.

There are six main characteristics of vToken derivatives:
1. Decentralization, traceability on the chain, transparent and checkable.
2. Governable, through BNC to implement vToken liquidity incentives, casting and redemption fees, interest ratios and other parameters governance.
3. Cross-chain, based on the underlying assets of Substrate, circulate in the parachain and EVM.
4. Full reserve, 1:1 full reserve locks in assets, and the value of derivatives is guaranteed
5. It can be replaced, you can get staking income by holding it, and it has governance function
6. Full use cases, compatible with decentralized and centralized use cases

For example, vETH is a staking derivative for ETH 2.0. As long as you hold vETH, you can get ETH 2.0 staking income, regardless of whether vETH is purchased or minted. And vsDOT has used the derivatives that can be obtained immediately after the slot auction, without waiting for the two-year lock-up period, you can sell vsDOT back to DOT in advance, participate in the next round of auctions, and win more parachain rewards. Participating in slot auctions in the form of leverage becomes possible.

Bifrost will open vETH trading in the near future and launch the vsBond trading market. Next, it will promote more parachain XCM cross-chains, such as Statemine, Moonriver, Phala, etc., and bring more assets into the entire Polkadot ecosystem. Promoting the launch of the Ethereum EVM-compatible cross-chain bridge, successfully connecting assets and bridge hubs, connecting Polkadot and EVM-compatible chain ecology, is a large-scale increase in assets and users.

Bifrost will continue to promote cross-chain with other parachain projects, bring Bifrost assets into more parachain projects, and establish a link with the ETH ecosystem, and announced plans for the Polkadot slot auction in the near future.

Zenlink

Hello, my name is Toga Mamora. I am the Ambassador of Zenlink. Today, I would like to introduce Zenlink to you.

Many people have been asking, is Zenlink a parachain project? The answer is no.

Zenlink is a cross-chain DEX protocol based on Polkadot, with an aim to help all parachains to achieve global liquidity sharing and cross-chain transactions at the same time, and allow users to safely exchange any assets between different parachains.

We started our development in Q3 2020 and have received fundings from prominent VCs such as DFG, Okex Blockdream, Alameda Research, Hashkey, IOSG and Hypershere.

Zenlink DEX consists of two core parts: the first is Zenlink DEX Module, which can enable parachains to access DEX capabilities after the Module is deployed on the parachain in a plug-and-pull manner, and the second is the cross-chain DEX protocol based on XCMP, which can link the liquidity of all parachains and realize the cross-chain trading function at the same time. Users do not need to care about which parachains that they are trading on.

Zenlink is 1st DEX to complete the cross-chain DEX trading on Polkadot ecosystem and have delivered 2 Web3 grants.

About a month ago, we launched the IYO (Initial Yield Offering) on Moonriver and Bifrost was awesome. We achieved $100 TVL in just 2 days. All the IYO criteria have been achieved and ZLK token is now transferrable and tradeable.

I would like to take this opportunity to encourage everybody to start participating in the platform by trading and providing liquidity as you will be greatly rewarded with ZLK tokens.

ZLK is a good token. It has utilities which are:

1. Staking

2. Trade mining booster

3. Governance

Therefore, come and join us at dex.zenlink.pro

If you have any questions, feel free to join our social media channels.

Litentry

1. Introduction to Litentry and our product plan

Litentry focuses on providing a myriad of decentralized identity solutions. Rooted in the Polkadot ecosystem, we are a cross-chain aggregated identities protocol. As you can see today, due to the highly fragmented nature of on-chain data, users fail to obtain better services on Web3 using their proven behaviors or histories; while service providers such as DeFi lending, gaming, NFT display, etc. are subject to these challenges and find it difficult to acquire target users or to provide customized products and services.

Litentry’s cross-chain aggregated identity aims to solve these problems. By indexing cross-chain data or data computation results, identity data can be aggregated and computed in the privacy-preserving environment of Offchain TEE workers, as such a cross-chain aggregated identity result can be provided to users.

At present, our current and under-development products include:

Web3Go, an open data analytics platform built for the Polkadot ecosystem, which has won 3 commendable awards in the Shanghai Blockchain Week last month;
My Crypto Profile, a product that allows you to connect identities and shill NFTs on Twitter, recently had a very successful partnership with the Sandbox;
A Mobile App that focuses on enriching the on-chain governance mechanism on Polkadot, which has been put into internal testing within the team;
Drop3, a decentralized TaskFi platform that supports whitelist airdrops and quest rewards;

The promise of identity aggregation is limitless and is the cornerstone of many applications on Web3. We also plan to develop more identity apps and product for the Polkadot ecosystem.

2. Litentry Crowdloan & reward schema

I believe a lot of you have heard of the Litentry Crowdloan, but in case you haven’t, I just want to quickly mention that Litentry is currently participating in the Polkadot slot auction and we are using 20% of the total supply of LIT to reward supporters who help us gain an edge in the auction.

Specifically, our crowdloan contributors will share a total of 20 million LIT reward pool that worth $100 million in market price. For each DOT contributed, you can earn at least 2.5 LIT. The final reward will be calculated as a percentage of your contribution to the pool.

In addition to the 20 million LIT basic rewards, users can receive up to 20% additional bonuses, including identity task rewards, etc. Besides our official crowdloan page and Polkadot.js, users can participate through Binance, Parallel and Bifrost to get liquidity and additional token rewards.

3. Batch 2 plan

Looking at our current crowdloan status, many of you might be interested in knowing if Litentry has a backup plan for Batch 2.

Assuming Litentry fails to get a slot during Batch 1, we will continue to bid on Batch 2 starting on December 23. All DOT contributions in Batch 1 will be automatically refunded to your accounts on December 17. We expect to start a new Crowdloan on The 18th, and users who choose to continue supporting us will need to re-participate in Batch 2’s Crowdloan campaign.

For Batch 1 contributors who re-enter our Batch2 campaign, Litentry will be compensating you with additional LIT until we win the auction. The compensation ratio is for each DOT, you get 0.12 LIT.

Our team is now actively preparing Batch 2’s reward schema and contacting more partners to bring you additional bonuses. According to our recent discussions, Litentry Batch 2 Crowdloan will not only retain most of Batch 1’s existing rewards, but will also bring in a Referral Program to grow the contributor base. The referrer’s referral reward will be in proportion to the contribution of the referee. We might also have other rewards such as NFT badges with special identity features for contributors; very exciting!

The detailed rules will be announced soon. Please keep an eye on us.

4. Reason to support us

Participation in our crowdloan should not be only about the short-term financial benefit, but also more about becoming a long-term ecological supporter of the Litentry project. It is also a crucial step you could take to help us build a decentralized identity infrastructure for Web3 and become a part of the trajectory. There are a couple of good reasons for you to support us,

Relatively low market risk. The biggest advantage of Litentry Crowdloan is that participants take a relatively little risk. LIT is currently traded on the world’s largest crypto exchanges and can be traded immediately once you own LIT. Polkadot slots are leased for 2 years, and rewards are distributed in a linear fashion. Participants should consider the long-term value of the project rather than short-term hype.
The project value is endorsed by the market and industry. Litentry is now ranking top 6 in terms of market cap in the Polkadot ecosystem, according to Messari, even before the mainnet is up and running. This shows that the market recognizes the existence and vision of Litentry and the community sees the team’s efforts. After mainnet launches, Litentry parachain will add more identity-related functions to increase project value.
A fairly small amount of LIT remains unreleased. More than 80% of current investor holdings of LIT have been released, which means less dumping pressure for LIT investors or contributors over the next two years. In other words, more manageable profits and less risk. On the contrary, almost all of the other programs on DotMarketCap plan to release most of their investors’ tokens within the next 2 years.
Powerful identity ecosystem. Litentry encourages developers to build identity-centric products, and the Litentry Foundation is providing financial support and technical assistance to incubate multiple identity projects. These include Polka Name System (Public Profile) MyCryptoProfile (NFT social), Web3Go (Credit Computing), Polka Sign-in (Interoperable Identity), and so on.

Zeitgeist

Hey guys, my name is Whisker, and I am the Chinese eco leader of Zeitgeist, I am very happy to receive an invitation to participate in this meetup. Today I want to introduce our project to you guys. We are Zeitgeist, an evolving blockchain for prediction markets and futarchy, our goal is to build a prediction markets hub on Polkadot ecosystem so that all parachains in polkadot ecosystem can use our SDK to make their on-chain governance better.

First of all, I would like to introduce our team. Our three founders are all outstanding in the industry. Our CEO Logan and CMO Hutch are both from Web3 Foundation, Logan has made considerable contributions to the Polkadot ecosystem, such as the Polkadot wiki and Thousand Validators Programme, which everyone is very familiar with. It is worth mentioning that Logan has been committed to Kusama launch until the end. Hutch is an outstanding community leader, he has been leading the development of the Polkadot community since 2019. And our CIO David Perry, has worked in the field of prediction markets for nearly two decades, providing prediction market services to many Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. government.

I know that most of you may not be so familiar with the prediction market. I will briefly introduce you to this field.

A prediction market is a collection of people who speculate on future events or results. And prediction markets are information aggregation machines, express wisdom of crowd in a quantitative form.

And I also want to talk about the past and prospects of prediction markets. The concept of prediction market has actually been around for a long time. Vitalik has been promoting the prediction market and Futarchy’s governance since 2014. Although there is no killer project in the market at present, we always believe that the blue ocean of prediction market will play a huge role in the future. We also want to be the hub of prediction markets in Polkadot’s cross-chain ecosystem

And I also want to introduce our Kusama parachain slot auction strategy.

Zeitgeist has a genesis supply of 100,000,000 ZTG (however, due to vesting and other items on the release schedule, the initial circulating supply will be much lower). Out of the total supply of ZTG, we have reserved up to 40,000,000 ZTG (40%) of the supply to incentivize Zeitgeist Crowdloans over the first few years of Zeitgeist’s existence.

For this first Zeitgeist Crowdloan (the next will be after the first lease period) we have allocated up to 12,500,000 ZTG (12.5%) of the genesis supply for those who bond KSM specific for the Zeitgeist parachain bid. We will have

Early Bonus Pool: 1,500,000 ZTG collectively allocated to early bonuses, including, but may not be evenly distributed among the Early Signup Bonus eligible participants, Early Supporter Bonus eligible participants, and Early Bird Bonus eligible participants.

Referral Bonus: 1,000,000 ZTG (1%) When you use a referral code, you will get an additional 5% bonus on your ZTG reward, and your referrer will get a 5% bonus (based on your contribution amount) added to their reward.

You can check more Infos here:

https://blog.zeitgeist.pm/zeitgeists-kusama-crowdloan-campaign/

About PolkaWorld

PolkaWorld is a Polkadot global community founded in 2019. We have gathered more than 40,000 Polkadot enthusiasts, and have always been committed to popularizing Polkadot knowledge, training Substrate developers, and supporting Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem.